Treasure under the soil

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33065, 4 November 1972, Page 12

Treasure under the soil

(Contributed by the Canterbury Museum)

One day in early October, Melville Syme was repairing the sheep yards on the Kaikoura Peninsula farm “The Point,” which he runs with his father, Mr Ronald Syme.

Using a tractor-driven posthole borer he was setting up a new fence line in sandy ground about three chains from the sea beach. Suddenly the borer struck a solid object, gyrated uselessly for a moment, then spun over the side of the obstruction and plunged deep into the sand. Digging in with the shovel to learn whether the stone

•was too big to move, he suddenly found it on his shovel blade, grey, smoothly shining, the sand tumbling off its polished surface, a large and superbly made Maori adze, Min long, 4in wide at the cutting edge, and registering on his wife’s kitchen scales, some 51b 13|ozs. With variations of time, place and farm implement, such a drama of discovery has been made many thousand times since the pakeha farmer’s plough first opened up the “skin” of the Fish of Maui (the North Island) or our own Te Waipounamu.

Scientific value

The finds, large and small, most often adzes and in every variety of stone including nephrite-greenstone, are scattered on private mantelpieces throughout the land, or have found their way to the display cases and reference storage of the museums of the nation. Less frequently than one would expect do such isolated finds indicate an archaeological layer which can be assigned to a known phase of Maori culture and roughly dated.

All such finds remain of considerable scientific value as fragments in the uncompleted “jigsaw” patterns of Maori prehistory, provided the basic documentation of the place where they were found is recorded on them, and, where possible also, the circumstances of discovery. If you have such an artefact and know where it was found take a soft pencil and write the place name on any suitable surface, preferably twice. Rare type Do not sell it please, and do not give it away carelessly to an individual. Look after it yourself and if you wish to part with it, place it as a loan or gift in a public museum. Although not from a full archaelogical context such finds are capable of telling quite a story when referred to a museum expert. In this case Mr Syme promptly reported his find to the Kaikoura Historical Society, who referred him on to the Canterbury Museum. We were able to tell the owner that the adze was made of a stone quarried in

the Nelson mineral belt, a light grey example of the baked argillites, originating as soft fine-grained mudstones, but baked hard by heat and pressure to the consistency of fine porcelain. Used at all periods, the argillites were the favoured adze material of the moahunter ancestors, particularly in the South Island. But by style this was not a moahunter adze.

Without going into details Mr Syme’s adze represented a rare type, intermediate between moa-hunter and classic Maori styles, and, to present knowledge, originating in Nelson. As for the date, while waiting to find such an adze in a dated layer, we can draw references from the area over which it has been found. This is why it is so important to write where your adze was found.

But this Kaikoura adze is also an object of great beauty in its own right. When the owner told his young daughter in my presence that he had left the adze at the Canterbury Museum for us to prepare a report about it, she came back immediately with another reason why such a treasure should be placed in a museum—“ Also, Daddy,” she said, “so other people can see it.”—R.S.D.

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